http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_1637389.html

(Pictures in the article)

Order Calendar Link: http://www.bibelkalender.p-p-m.de/kalender.htm

A German church group has caused controversy by releasing a calendar using nude models to portray bible scenes.

(Picture here)

The calendar, on sale for £8 in the Katzwanger church in Nuremburg, contains photos such as a naked Eve holding an apple between her breasts for Adam.

Another month shows a topless Delilah cutting the hair of a sleeping Sampson.

(Picture Here)

Other pictures portray the baptism of Jesus, Lot's daughters, the dance of Salome and the sacrifice of Isaac - many involving nudity.

Stefan Wiest, 32, spokesman for the Katzwang Evangelical Youth group, said: "We wanted to bring old religious paintings to today's people by translating them in a contemporary context.

"We did not intend to cause any provocation and have received more positive responses that negative."

Mr Wiest added that most of the criticism has come from the USA but said it has not slowed sales since the release: "Our first 200 have already sold out and we are printing another 300 today to meet demand."

But the feedback page on the group's website has been taken down due to the number of comments the calendar has caused.

Winfried Roehmel, a spokesman for the region's Catholic archdiocese, said: "It is not acceptable to pose naked in a church. The right way to approach the Holy Scriptures is not by pulling your pants down."

http://tinyurl.com/aa7tt

BERLIN (Reuters) - A German Protestant youth group has put together a 2006 calendar with 12 staged photos depicting erotic scenes from the Bible, including a bare-breasted Delilah cutting Samson's hair and a nude Eve offering an apple.

"There's a whole range of biblical scriptures simply bursting with eroticism," said Stefan Wiest, the 32-year-old photographer who took the titillating pictures.

Anne Rohmer, 21, poses on a doorstep in garters and stockings as the prostitute Rahab, who is mentioned in both New and Old Testaments. "We wanted to represent the Bible in a different way and to interest young people," she told Reuters.

"Anyway, it doesn't say anywhere in the Bible that you are forbidden to show yourself nude."

Bernd Grasser, pastor of the church in Nuremberg where the calendar is being sold, was enthusiastic about the project which is explained online at www.bibelkalender.de.

"It's just wonderful when teenagers commit themselves with their hair and their skin to the bible," he said.

Well, they definitly got peoples attention! So much that their site is no longer working!

I would have liked to see the rest of the pictures in order to understand the message behind it.

With the apple between the breasts, I see Adam being tempted, not by the apple, but by the breasts, which in turn implies that the temptation was sex, not the apple. And of course, an apple was most likely not the fruit in the first place.

But it does say that they are willing to push the envelope to get the bible into the hands of a lot more people than before.

What can we do to "tell it like it is"?

Boyd

I don't have a problem with honest depictions of biblical events, and that includes those events that would involve a naked body, but I don't think that this calender, or at least what I saw of it, is trying to be honest.

Looks to me like they're trying to appeal to a larger, probably younger audience by catering to their very worldly sensibilities with very posed nudes.

Not all nudes look natural, and the ones that I saw from this calender look horribly staged. If the idea was to present the events as they truely happened, including the nakedness, why not do exactly that instead of making the pictures look like some advertising agencies attempt to turn the bible into some kind of product that can be marketed to "new and exciting (excited?)audiences"?

To try to draw young people into the church (or just into religion) through gratuitous images like these is awful. If we want our culture to understand that naked is natural and okay, this kind of thing needs to be objected to. Sorry, but I don't think that it advances anything.

Kevin

I agree, Kevin. Think of the biblical nudes contained in the great paintings and sculptures of the Renaissance. There was a different quality, a non-chalance that this calendar doesn't have.

The photographer admitted that he was deliberately seeking to depict the scriptural stories in an erotic manner.

It is likely that nudity was more common and less sensational in Biblical times than it is today in the Western nations, particularly America.
And I would welcome a Bible calendar that was more relaxed about nudity without the awkward eroticism depicted in this European calendar.

I remember seeing a naked Adam and Eve in the movie "The Bible" (mostly hidden by shrubs).

When I was about 8 years old, my Sunday school teacher taught us about Adam and Eve and one of the study materials was a cartoon poster depicting the first couple before the fall, obviously nude but sitting in a manner that didn't show genitals and Eve's hair covered her breasts. But it was enough to teach me at that early age that nudity was good and was God's orginal plan for humanity.